Hi, everyone! As you may know, I'm attempting once again to do exposure therapy. I have a lot of reservations going in. I haven't had really good experiences with exposure therapy in the past, and forcing myself to put myself through intense emotional and physical pain on purpose, especially knowing that none of my attempts in the past actually worked, is near impossible.
I was thinking last night and this morning about my fears in relation to doing exposure therapy and one that kept coming up was my fear of failure. I'd previously thought that my fear of failure had abated as my perfectionism got less severe over the past few years, but apparently not.
Here is an excerpt from my journal entry this morning, concerning my fear of failure: "...I’m
also terrified of failing. I’ve gone to therapy or done therapy activities
countless times and none of them have succeeded. And I know that I’m in a different
position now than I was any of those times, but even my attempt last summer
didn’t work. And I take failing very personally. Especially since I think I connect
all of my failures to my lack of friends. Its like, maybe if I succeed at this
one thing, people will hear about it and think “hey, maybe she’s worth talking
to now.” Which is crappy. Both because that shouldn’t be my goal and because
that’s a crappy way to talk about people and to get friends. But everything I do,
every action I take, its not to make myself feel better, its not for me. Its so
that maybe someone with hear about it and think “oh, she’s really cool, maybe I’ll
talk to her.” Every action I take. Painting my nails. Crocheting cool stuff.
Therapy. Buying new clothes. Going outside. And it sucks because I don’t
want to live my life like that. But I’m so… damaged and traumatized by my
abandonment that the only thing I can think of, even subconsciously, is to do
things that catch people’s attention. And I try not to, I try to do things
because I want to do them, but I inevitably end up doing them for other people.
My self worth is so wrapped up in my capabilities and my fear of failure that I
don’t know where to begin unravelling it. I learned at a very young age that if
you fail, people don’t like you. If you succeed, people do. And as a very
lonely and socially inept child, I took that message to heart. My academic achievements
are, in part, because I love learning. But they’re mostly just an attempt to be
better. If I do better, I get better, then I’ll be good enough to help other
people. And if I’m good enough to help other people, then people will keep me
around and talk to me because they know I can and will help them. It sucks to acknowledge that nothing I’ve done in my entire life is for myself. Everything
has been done in the pursuit of friendship and being less alone. I suppose I need
to work on my fear of failure before I start exposure therapy."
I'd like to talk about it in a little more depth and detail, as some of what I wrote probably doesn't make sense to other people if they don't know my whole life story. I'm going to talk about it in chronological order in the way it happened, not the order that I wrote it in.
I was a lonely and socially inept child. I wasn't socialized a lot before I entered school and because of that, I didn't always understand the intricacies and social mores of interaction. I learned very young that if you didn't have any talents, if you didn't play sports, if you weren't very good at social interaction, the only way people kept you around was if you were useful. Well, the only thing that I was good at was school. So I excelled. And it kept me from being at the total bottom of the social ladder.
As I got older, I started getting more friends, more people seemed to want to talk to me. And it wasn't just because I was useful. I loved it. But then my anxiety got so bad that I was forced to leave regular public school. People stopped seeing me on a regular basis. I couldn't even hang out with them because of my anxiety. And eventually they lost interest in me. So I had failed at the one thing that I cared about more than anything in the world: having friends.
In the past 5 years, I reverted back to my old mental training that said that if I was useful, people would keep me around. I constantly offered other people help. I sent them gifts. I tried my hardest to do cool things in spite of my anxiety. All so that other people could see what I was doing and think that I was worth keeping around. None of it worked. Apparently the "can't hang out" defect is harder to overcome than "never learned how to interact with others."
All my brain can think is "If you fail, people will not like you." And part of that is a fallacy, people can like other people who fail. People can be friends with other people who fail. But, given my circumstances, part of that is true. I've been incapable of getting or keeping friends because of my anxiety. My only chance to not be this alone forever is exposure therapy. And the enormity of this burden is keeping me from starting the therapy.
I wrote in a twitter thread last night that one of the reasons why I'm reluctant to get a therapist involved is because the less people who know about me doing therapy, the less people who will know if I fail; who will be disappointed in me if I fail.
I think that the main difference between me and a lot of other people who have a fear of failure is that it didn't stem from my parents attitude toward me. It came from my peers. I actually have another post in my drafts about the importance of peers in the development of self esteem issues and perfectionism.
As I stated in my journal entry, my self esteem is so wrapped up in my capabilities and my fear of failure that I don't know where to start unravelling it. I've spent my entire life believing that in order for people to like me, in order to have friends, I have to succeed. That failing is unforgivable. And I need to work on that before I start exposure therapy, or I'm just going to be subconsciously holding myself back from giving the therapy all of my effort. The less effort I put into it, the less of a failure it is if I do end up failing. If I don't give it my all, then I have an easy excuse for the failure. "Well, its not surprising that I failed, I didn't really put in enough effort." And then people have a reason to stick around for another attempt, if I do make another attempt instead of just curling up into a ball of shame and rage for the rest of my life. But I don't have the years that are probably required to understand and work on my fear of failure. I need to start exposure therapy soon, or I'm just going to keep putting it off for years and years until I eventually die, even more lonely than I currently am.
Wow that was all depressing. Now that I've gotten all of that out, here's a small bit of positivity.
I'm going to try to set small goals. The goal of being able to do and leave my house as I please is a ginormous goal that will likely take years to achieve. And if I set that as a goal, it will be very difficult for me to not take failures and setbacks, even small ones, to heart. I think I will set goals for the amount of time I will spend on therapy, not on the outcome. I have no way of controlling the outcome. I could work for weeks or months and not really achieve much. But setting goals on the amount of time I spend on therapy is something that I can control. That way, I have no goals or expectations set on the outcome.
I hope that you enjoyed this first post in the journal series. I can't promise when I'll be back, but I hope to have more content ready to post soon.
Love always,
Sam
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